Getting template text from FreeMarker in Spring app

Question

In my Spring app, I\'d like to use FreeMarker to generate the text of emails that will be sent by my application. The generated text will never be returned to the view so I

Answer 1

Something like this should work

Before the code you provided, initialize:

MailSender mailSender = new JavaMailSenderImpl();
SimpleMailMessage message = new SimpleMailMessage();

Then, after your code, add:

StringBuffer content = new StringBuffer();
try {
    content.append(FreeMarkerTemplateUtils.processTemplateIntoString(
        configuration.getTemplate(templateName), templateVars));
} catch (IOException e) {
    // handle
} catch (TemplateException e) {
    // handle
}

message.setFrom(getMailFromName() + " <" + getMailFromAddr() + ">");
message.setTo(getMailTo());
if (getCcTo() != null)
    message.setCc(getCcTo());
message.setSubject(getSubject());
message.setText(content.toString());

mailSender.send(message);

Here's my applicationContext.xml:

<bean id="freemarkerMailConfiguration"
  class="org.springframework.ui.freemarker.FreeMarkerConfigurationFactoryBean">
    <property name="templateLoaderPath" value="/WEB-INF" />
</bean>
<bean id="yourEmailServiceClass" class="YourEmailServiceClass">
    <property name="mailSender" ref="mailSender" />
    <property name="freemarkerMailConfiguration" ref="freemarkerMailConfiguration" />
    <property name="freemarkerTemplate" value="email.ftl" />
    <property name="mailFromName" value="John Q. Programmer" />
    <property name="mailFromAddr" value="john.q.programmer@mail.com" />
    <property name="subject" value="Email Subject" />
</bean>

And your caching question...

I've only seen a bean property 'cache' in a 'viewResolver' bean, which you said you won't be using.

See also: Chapter 14. Integrating view technologies